BEVERLY — Joanne Shaw Taylor is widely considered a blues artist, but she doesn’t consider any of her nine studio albums to be blues records and she doesn’t write what she sees as blues songs.
“I’ve always said I’m a blues guitarist, I’m a soul singer and a pop-rock writer and it all just kind of jumbles together, because I’m hugely influenced by blues,” she said in a phone interview before her Wednesday, Nov. 22, show at The Cabot.
“All my (vocal) influences were male, so I had to seek out other music forms with female voices. And then again, just as a music fan, I love good pop songs, whether that’s David Bowie or Bonnie Raitt or Fleetwood Mac or, I love Harry Styles new album.”
Taylor’s description of her music might be more accurate than ever with her latest album, “Nobody’s Fool.”
Yes, there is a blues influence, especially on rockier tracks like “Just No Getting Over You (Dream Cruise),” “Then There’s You” and the funky title track, as well as the soulful ballad “The Leaving Kind.” But on what may be Taylor’s most musically diverse album, there’s also a strong pop/rock thread running through the frisky “Bad Blood,” the sweet and light “Won’t Be Fooled Again” even the driving “Figure It Out,” while “Runaway” has a jazzy folk feel.
These musical styles have all surfaced on Taylor’s earlier albums, but she feels “Nobody’s Fool” has a different slant.
“Like ‘Just Another Word’ on the ‘White Sugar’ album (her 2009 debut release) was quite a poppy, catchy kind of mid-tempo ballad, and I’ve done that on every album,” Taylor said. “There’s been sort of sprinkles of it, but I think this is the first time I just went for as catchy of choruses as I could.”
For “Nobody’s Fool,” Taylor teamed up with her long-time close friend, blues-rocker Joe Bonamassa, and his producing partner Josh Smith. The pair also produced “The Blues Album,” Taylor’s 2021 disc of cover songs by blues artists.
The recording of “The Blues Album” went smoothly. And as Taylor began to turn her attention to making a new album of original material, she was excited to team up again with Bonamassa and Smith, and feels their partnership grew over the course of making “Nobody’s Fool” at the legendary Sunset Sound studio in Los Angeles.
“I think it’s far more collaborative than any album I’ve ever done. I do see me, Joe and Josh as sort of a band, really,” Taylor said. “I provide the songs, but they’re very involved in the arrangement really, the direction that those songs go. I essentially give them a song on acoustic guitar and vocal, so they have a lot of say in it. I think that’s been very beneficial to me.”
Some of the 10 original songs on “Nobody’s Fool” took on whole new shapes with the input of Bonamassa and Smith. A prime example is “Runaway.”
“That’s one of my favorites, actually,” Taylor, 38, said. “I wrote it on acoustic and it was really Joe’s and Josh’s idea to kind of take it in more of a slightly Joni Mitchell (direction), I would say, which I really liked.”
Another song that evolved considerably is the one cover tune on “Nobody’s Fool,” a version of the Eurythmics’ hit, “Missionary Man,” which gets an effectively slower and grittier treatment.
“Again, that was Joe and Josh,” Taylor said. “I had it as a very sort of acoustic blues kind of format. They took it and played around with it and I came in and they kind of got that vibe going of, it’s almost a White Stripes form, that coolness to it, a little bit darker. And I was like ‘Actually, this really works. I really like what we’re doing with it.’ It was such a different take on it. And fortunately, Dave (Stewart) was in L.A. at the same time as me, so it felt right to finally do something with him (in the studio) after all of these years.”
Stewart, Annie Lennox’s musical partner in the Eurythmics, is the musician who discovered Taylor when she was 16. He immediately hired her for his touring band at the time and helped her get meetings with a number of record labels as she was getting her career off the ground. By the time she met Stewart, Taylor, who started out playing classical guitar at age 8, had already been gigging for a couple of years.
Taylor’s songwriting skills, her soulful and sassy voice and her guitar chops have earned her a steadily growing audience. She thinks the “Nobody’s Fool” material is enriching the live shows she’s starting to play to promote the album.
“I think it definitely adds a new dynamic, but it’s not too far of a stretch,” said Taylor, who has just released a new single, “Sweet ‘Lil Lies,” that also figures to be included in her shows. “It’s still kind of rooted in blues, pop soul, which I think I’ve always sort of skirted around those three genres. So I think it will tie in nicely, but I think also it will give a bit of a lift in the set to kind of change tack a little bit.”